Beyond the re-start: Signs it’s time to outsource your IT help desk

Is your IT department overwhelmed with maintenance and support tickets? While there’s nothing wrong with having them serve as your company's help desk, you may need to consider looking for outside assistance if you’re actually planning greater things for your IT team. Here are a few signs that you need to outsource help desk tasks to a managed IT services provider (MSP).

Your IT team is falling behind on support tickets

You know you’re in deep trouble if your team can’t keep up with the day-to-day maintenance of your IT infrastructure. Symptoms of operational lag include:

• Increasing time to resolution – It's taking a lot more time to resolve tickets.
• Spillover of support requests – Level 1 support is getting so overwhelmed that they are pushing tickets up to Level 2 support, when these should really remain in Level 1.
• Worsening customer and staff complaints – People are getting more irate with how long it takes to resolve issues, how the results are subpar, and how poor the quality of interactions are.
• More staff taking sick days – Stress from dealing with internal customers and conflict within the help desk team make support staff fall ill, putting even more pressure on their remaining colleagues.
• Delayed or rushed on-boarding of new employees – a disorganized help desk does not inspire new hires, but will most likely make you look like a troubled employer who isn’t running the ship properly.

Your company is unable to maintain technology best practices

If your team is lagging behind on OS updates, drivers, and patches, then you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches.

Another sign of best practices failure is an increasing reliance on workarounds. An alarm in your head should go off if you see IT support staff increasingly turn to Google or YouTube for tech tutorials. More than revealing lack of training and expertise, taking the time to fill in the gaps makes resolving issues take longer, significantly decreasing productivity.

Still more alarms should go off if you see them using their own personal machines to resolve support issues. This shows that in-house tech is insufficient for what they need to accomplish. While a show of initiative from IT staff is commendable, the use of unvetted equipment opens your organization up to data breaches, which are never a good thing.

Your business is not big enough to have its own help desk and accomplish strategic IT initiatives as well

Let’s say your IT team has a handle on maintenance tasks and is even able to resolve trouble tickets within 24 hours. That’s well and good, but what if you want to create digital transformation plans, perform internal audits and time motion studies, or implement company-wide cybersecurity training seminars?

Let’s face it. If your help desk staff is already over-extended during regular days, imagine the impact from cyberattacks or other major data loss events.

Furthermore, your business might already need constant IT support, but your IT team can’t be set up to provide service around the clock every day of the year.

Instead of breaking the backs of your IT specialists, offload help desk tasks to a reliable MSP, one that has an army of experts available 24x7x365.

More than assisting you with important-but-rote tasks, a great MSP can also provide you with the services you need to achieve digital transformation. Migrate to the cloud, secure your business against natural and man-made disasters, and undergo enterprise resource planning… you can set up your IT infrastructure to support unprecedented growth with the help of an MSP.

Your IT department has a lot of responsibilities. If operating a help desk seems increasingly overwhelming, reach out to XBASE Technologies immediately. Our Exponentially Better™ IT services are geared to support your users, help your IT team achieve strategic objectives, and enable your business to fulfill its potential for growth.